While working on the relaunch of this site, I was thinking in the back of my head that it had been maybe five-ish years since I last redesigned the site. Turns out it’s been nearly eight years. That’s, um, a long time.

And a lot has happened in those eight years. When I launched that redesign, I was in the middle of my third Blogathon (the first two I participated in; the third I helped monitor). I was in my just-barely-late-20s. I was blogging something almost every day. I was running a myriad sites.

What happened since then? Facebook. Twitter. Fatherhood.

In the last couple of years, my blog disintegrated into a dusty pile of auto-posted delicious links. I wrote one or two posts of substance per year. I moved the mundane thoughts to Twitter. I made a conscious decision to move more personal postings to Facebook. But I never quite figured out what to do with laze.net.

So, here I am, in 2011. Mid-30s. Dad. Several sites lighter. And feeling ready to revive this thing and give it another go.

From a design standpoint, even though I’m calling this a redesign, it’s not really. I’m just tweaking an existing template a little bit. I decided it was time to move to a simpler layout and clear out some cruft on the site (yeah, I know URLs should never die, but some of this content is begging to be killed). I like the one-column look this theme has and am perfectly happy not trying to cram every bit of content I’m producing into a sidebar.

From a content perspective, I’ve killed the auto-posted delicious links and while I’ve kept all the old blog content (I couldn’t let Maury go away, could I?), I’ve moved it all under a category called “Zee Classic Collection1.” While I’m not going to be posting anywhere near everyday, I’m shooting for a few moderate-length posts per month. Think Kottke minus the posts about David Foster Wallace, Errol Morris, and foodie topics. I’ll write about the stuff that interests me at the moment: tea, movies, music, retrofuturism, and Japanese fiction with the occasional bits of parenting, politics, and technology. I’m going to do my best to not jump on a topic just because everyone else is. I’m done with that game. I just want to write some good stuff about things I care about.

This is definitely a work in progress. Stuff’s going to break. I may bring some old content back. I’m experimenting with different content aggregation methods.

Dig in, enjoy, and pass along any feedback. Not sure how many of my old visitors are checking in, but if you are, say hi!

1Why “Zee”? Because “Zee” sounds like “the” when said by a stereotypical movie Frenchman. Oh yeah, and because it’ll cause it to sort last on my archive page.